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"Well. I was born in Valinor and I was fated to die but only once I was grown up, and in Valinor if you die you can come back."

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"Eldar - and Maiar and Valar - technically 'don't have free will'. Which means they can swear unbreakable oaths and there are some reliable prophecies about what's going to happen to them. Then I showed up and now everything's all wacky."

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"I wonder if oaths work here," Rúmil says.

"I swear that -"

"Fëanáro!"

"I was going to test it with something like 'as far as I know I haven't lied in the last five minutes', don't worry!"
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"- please don't play around with those but would that even do anything? Would you be able to tell?"

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"You feel it when you make one, yes, at home," Rúmil says. "I agree with not playing around with those."

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"If I'm being deputized into telling Fëanáro why things are a bad idea should I have more context on this?"

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"Oaths are unbreakable and not in a, a friendly narrativey way where you turn out to have accidentally fulfilled them even if you were trying to do something else, or in some neutral cosmological force way, it's more like compulsion plus intolerable psychological consequences for digging in your heels -"

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"We very rarely make them, and take them very gravely," Rúmil says. "Don't we, Fëanáro."

"My mom swore to kill me - she didn't mean it, she was giving birth to me and it really hurt and she said something she didn't intend - and it nearly ruined all our lives."
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"Bella helped fix it."

"Oaths compel you to try. Making the task you've sworn to do literally impossible makes the Oath - not absent, but it can't get its hooks in."
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"How did you...?"

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"Patient confidentiality," sighs Bella. "Doesn't affect what they can say, just me."

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"Subtle arts lets you do all kinds of things," Fëanáro says, "like make it impossible for people to do a thing. And if it's impossible for my mom to kill me then the Oath lets her wait. Forever."

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"That's, um."

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"Nice for her but creepy that I can do that?"

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"Yes, exactly."

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"Well, I don't just go around doing subtle arts to people."

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"She gave the whole continent a lecture about therapeutic ethics," Rúmil says, "That provoked picketing of a major deity."

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"...what was the major deity doing?"

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"He was responsible for bringing the dead back to life, and he was fixing them first. With consent, but Bella felt it wasn't very much consent if they had to work with him to stop be dead."

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"...fixing... them?"

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"Those who have been under the correction of Mandos will not speak of it, and indeed, being healed, remember little of it; for they have returned to their natural courses, and the unnatural and perverted is no longer in the continuity of their lives." He says this steadily, as if speaking from memory.

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"I first noticed there was a problem when I heard the reembodied were coming back with fuzzy memories - not even just of being dead, but of things before that. I could clear off the fuzz, but that wasn't quite - everything. Sooooo I gave a really passive aggressive lecture."

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